Mike Leigh flawlessly builds lived-in lives. As strange as it sounds, it's true - each of his characters carries a sense of history to their own incarnations. It's as if the delicately expressed years behind them do truly exist beyond some screenwriter's rough sketch of a vague character history and impersonal attributes. It feels like Leigh and his actors have spent their lifetimes surrounding the aged characters, able to draw out their instincts and traits with effortlessness. This can be the case with all of Leigh's work, but here in a quasi in-time experience with them it's likely the most felt.

It's felt in Another Year that one is watching people on screen and nothing else; that they are fleshed-out…

If I had to point to a character in cinema that maybe one day I could, if I were lucky, maybe I could be, it would be Gerri. If I had to point to one that I am almost certainly actually going to turn out to be, it would be Mary.

Gerri is a confident, mature, loving woman who is in a strong relationship, and she is decent and protective of her family and intelligent and sincere. She has her life together, which makes me envy her, I admit, and she has a very real relationship with her husband that is neither picturesque perfection or rocky dysfunction. She is a real person, but that seems redundant to saying she's a…

Another Year is a heartbreaking story of a woman who desperately wants love and companionship as she faces getting older alone. Lesley Manville is outstanding as Mary, the most irritating and energy sucking person you will ever meet, who wears her desperation on her sleeve making it difficult to hate her.

The film centres on four seasons in the life of Gerri and Tom, a happily married couple who are the rock for their depressed friends Mary and Ken. You wonder why they don't seek out happy friends, but perhaps they feel they should give love and support where it is needed, given that they have so much themselves. But when Mary goes too far by being jealous of and…

An excellent ensemble drama from Mike Leigh. The film can be quite bleak at times dealing with these characters getting older and how certain ones deal with it. That's clearest in Leslie Manville's character. She's undoubtedly the standout, a performance criminally ignored during awards season.

There’s nothing more human and real than Mike Leigh’s evocative ensemble drama that is filled with powerfully understated performances and thoughtful, multi-layered writing. Another Year follows the lives of a close-knit family and their relationships with their colleagues and friends over the course of four seasons of the year. Leigh’s distinct directorial style of observing human condition and the nuances of the mundane are captured vividly and sincerely in the lives of his characters. No one looks, or sounds, and maybe feels out of place in the story, all of them are enmeshed in Leigh’s superb microcosm of family, hope and discontent.

Another Year seems to be a despairing film to watch because it feels monotonous and the characters seems…

King of the bantz - Mike Leigh's ability to wrench painfully real performances, especially from his actresses (in this case, Lesley Manville), continues to shine here in this quiet and subdued drama. Such confident screenwriting; such a refrained and controlled piece of direction.

Though it's funny, the more Leigh films I watch, the more depressed his works seems to be, the more I cherish a movie like Happy-Go-Lucky for going in the opposite direction,

This movie touches upon current sociological and psychological conditions that result to alienation and loneliness. It's well directed, acted and shot! However, alot of parts lacked cohesion and din't really feel like a story to me.

Been watching a lot of Leigh's work lately, and I'll have to admit that most of his films are so thematically and stylistically similar that it's often difficult to tell them apart. Another Year doesn't venture away from familial themes and characters with terminal flaws, but it does depart from Leigh's tendency to take characters to their respective breaking points through predictable and sometimes wildly melodramatic climaxes.

Like the story of the wealthy young woman in need of an abortion in Vera Drake, I'm intrigued by how many of the character arcs in Another Year remain open and unresolved. It feels less like pretentious dereliction and more like a portrayal of humanity as a growing thing with branches and leaves that wither and fall away. Mary (Lesley Manville) is one of these branches. Watching her slow dissolution had me saying "fuuuuuuck" at the final cut to black for the first time since seeing Haneke's Amour.

I'm not sure how I felt, or really how Leigh wanted me to feel, during this movie. But I know the feeling was complex.

You have this couple -- both of whom have these stable, health-focused jobs in therapy and environmental testing (both working to build strong foundations, physically and figuratively). And they serve as a kind of safehaven for these lost souls. The husband and wife both garden in their free time, caring for and cultivating healthy crops, and their home is full of greenery and life.

What a contrast that is to these visitors they get, these broken people who come by looking for love and a listening ear. And mostly, that's what they find there -- these…